Marvel creates new deaf superhero for kid who doesn't want to wear hearing aid

[cyberghostface]

So apparently there's a deaf kid named Anthony Smith who didn't want to wear his hearing aid because superheroes don't have them, so his mother sent a letter to Marvel. They sent him the cover to West Coast Avengers #1 given that Hawkeye was once deaf and required a hearing aid, as well as designing a superhero based on him. A non-embeddable video can be found here.

Comments

[gerardotejada]

Did I say is a great time to be a Marvel Fan? It is.

[beoweasel]

A deaf superhero...will he team up with Daredevil for whacky hijinks? ;p

[icon_uk]

Echo is already a deaf heroine who has done just that IIRC

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Bendis killed Echo, actually

[protogarrett]

What!? When!? How!? *rage as only deaf superhero is killed.*

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

She and Moon Knight were taking on Count Nefarious by themselves, and a logical narrative took over. Shame it missed Moon Knight...

[lilacsigil]

Rages with you! She was awesome!

[icon_uk]

I confess that it did strike me as being a disability which might make being a superhero particularly hard. Especially if you're a street level combatant like Echo.

Daredevil may be blind, but has ultra-senses and his extra radar sense as a counterbalance, I don't think Echo did (but I coudl be wrong).

Even the sort of sensitvity of vibration that a deaf person may still retain (and can be quite startlingly acute) is sort of skewered in superfight terms by the fact that often the opponent can fly.

I'm sure there are many ways around such things, but it always seemed an odd one to me.

[glprime]

No doubt it would be a harder hill to climb than Matt's (and she really just seemed to be created as a counter-point to Matt), but I admired how she knew what strengths she HAD (eidetic memory, both mental and physical; very good athletic ability), and pushed them as far as she could to compensate. So I really enjoyed seeing her as another Badass Normal mixing it up with the supes.

[sailorlibra]

Really? That sucks. Echo is one of the best Marvel characters.

[stolisomancer]

Moon Knight was canceled before Bendis completed it, but the Hand got to Echo's body before it was cold. She's probably not as dead as she looked.

[morwen]

Where did you get that? I thought the storyline was wrapped up pretty well, and Bendis says that they were contracted for 12 issues, which they did, and regret that they weren't able to hand it over to another creative team.

[crinos]

Isn't Penance (Not Emo Speedball, the good Penance) supposed to be deaf too?

[long_silence]

I thought she was mute

[crinos]

As I understood it, in the original draft of Penance (Where she was a Yugoslavian girl with adaptive powers who was shell shocked into a permanent crystaline form), she was deaf, because there was a scene where Banshee tried several languages to communicate to her with, and the one she understood was ASL (Sign language).

Plus, didn't she talk in the loners mini?

[icon_uk]

There have been so many bizarre versions of Penance/Hollow that I've long since given up wondering if they all had the same powers.

[minervasolo.livejournal.com]

Which is weird because why would a Yugoslavian girl know American Sign Language?

(for that matter, why would Banshee? BSL would have made more sense.)

[icon_uk]

Banshee was an interpol agent, he probably knows several langauges and might well include a couple of sign languages.

In Penance's case it would perhaps depend on who taught it to her. The same way as in learning a spoken language where you often pick up the idioms and accents of your tutor.

[thanekos]

Throw Black Bolt in, and the title writes itself.

[icon_uk]

Indeed, the title could be "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil... Evil is still screwed"

[bj_l]

That's a great tagline!

Not so much a great title. But I'm far to lazy to try and come up with one.;)

[icon_uk]

It's the title/ethos of the famous Three wise Monkey's

[icon_uk]

That's damned cool of the creators involved!

[leikomgwtfbbq]

Awww, that's really sweet :D

(Although... I totally thought that the Clint in the second image was borrowing Barda's outfit... what the fuck, brain)

[viridian5]

To me, in black and white the scales look like mesh and the piece under that like a kind of woman's bodice.

[thespis]

Awww. This is the most adorable thing I've seen all day.

[dr_archeville]

Am I the only one who finds it jarring that Marvel made, for a deaf boy who refuses to wear a hearing aid, a character (the Blue Ear) who uses a prominent hearing aid?

[amazing]

I thought that was sort of the point? To encourage him to wear his hearing aid?

[dr_archeville]

That would make some sense.

I am not used to Marvel making sense.

[amazing]

It's certainly quite rare. *rueful*

[cloudtrader]

This is more than a bit insensitive, actually. There is a huge debate in the deaf community over hearing aids and forcing children to wear them (and an even bigger one over cochlear implants). This is the hearing majority trying to mainstream the deaf minority and stamp out their culture, to some ways of thinking, and Marvel is going along with the mainstream rhetoric.

[cyberghostface]

I'm not sure what the problem is. He just didn't want to wear it because superheroes don't wear them so Marvel made one for him to give him self-esteem.

[cloudtrader]

That's the point, actually. Why must a deaf child's self-esteem be bound up in hearing? Why couldn't Marvel have made a superhero that rejected the use of a hearing aid and instead used ASL? The deaf community maintains that being deaf is not a disability, as the dominant hearing culture would have you believe, but rather a simple variation of the human norm, like any other minority group. We don't advocate black people somehow bleaching their skin to "fit in" with the majority white culture, so why should deaf people have to change, abandoning ASL and the very real deaf community?

[ensiform]

You're really stretching it to say this is "more than a bit insensitive." It was a sweet gesture of Marvel on behalf of the mother. Some people try very hard to look for things to be oppressed by, hm?

I'm well aware of the Deaf community and ASL -- I had a long-time girlfriend who was deaf -- and there's really no need to bring up the Cochlear debate here. We know nothing about this boy other than that he was issued a hearing aid and his mother wants him to wear it. Marvel was extremely big-hearted to address this boy personally and make his hearing aid seem "cool."

That's leaving aside the very reasonable position that someone can use a hearing device AND be fluent in ASL and remain within the deaf community. You know. In order to interact with the vast, vast majority of the world.

[cloudtrader]

Fair enough. Although I do find your statement that "some people try very hard to look for things to be oppressed by, hm?" to be extremely rude. Are personal attacks truly necessary?

[ensiform]

I sincerely apologize. I meant it as a gentle, silly dig, but should have remembered that tone and intent don't translate well to the Internet. No personal offense meant.

[cloudtrader]

Apology accepted, I'm possibly too sensitive about this topic, so was too quick to take offense.

[cyberghostface]

Why couldn't Marvel have made a superhero that rejected the use of a hearing aid and instead used ASL?

Because the mother asked for one with a hearing aid. Marvel's not looking to make a statement on the debate, they were just trying to make a mother and her child happy. I'm sure they would have shown him Echo if the kid needed a motivator to learn ASL.

[cloudtrader]

I'm sure that Marvel had nothing but good intentions, true, as does the mother of the child. I just find it sad that the assumptions behind this.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Lordy...

Ya know, I'm not going to go into detail, but I've got 18 scars over my body as a result of medical procedures I needed to have a body as functional as everyone else. My parents never really asked me if I wanted the operations, and they shouldn't have. Because if they'd have asked, I might have refused and lost the ability to use a limb (or worse).

Disability isn't an identity. It certainly shapes identity but, by definition, it is an inability to do something everyone else can. And if it can be fixed, it should be.

Black people don't face any risk with darker skin. Deaf people, on the other hand, lack sensory input that could greatly improve their lives (and possibly save it). So I'm not seeing a comparison.

[cloudtrader]

Fair enough. Here is a link that may help you better understand the perspective I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Ya know, if it's a culture not defined by the inability to hear, I don't see the issue with hearing aids.

[intertobamf]

Are you deaf? I find this entire thing stupid, but I'm not seeing the need to connect this to audism, and it's offensive for you to compare a disability* to race.

*No, I'm not really interested in debating this point.

[tronlives]

(let me preface by saying that I am not deaf, but my girlfriend is an ASL interpreter and I'm trying to understand as much about Deaf culture as I can...)

This kind of struck me as questionable too, and I've been really interested to learn what Deaf comic book fans think about this, given the debate about making kids wear hearing aids.
I looked through the comments on some of the articles about it, and the only comments I saw from deaf folks were critical (either, as you said, the assumption that they need to be "fixed" or the fact that most of the articles use the term "hearing impaired") but they also got strangely homophobic O_O

But yeah. tl;dr, you're not the only one who found this problematic.

[cloudtrader]

Thank goodness, I was beginning to think it was just me!

(Also, awesome icon, yay for Black Books!)

[tronlives]

(Thank you! :D )

[mistygeek]

Sometimes I wish I read Marvel.

[blackruzsa]

The last drawing is incredibly sweet. The first one's silly in a nice way.